Tuesday, November 26, 2013

The State of portableCAD in 2013

Issue #799

Each year for three years now, I've spoken to developers at the Bricsys International Conference about the state of CAD in the portable market -- Android tablets, iPhones, and so on. When I first spoke two years ago in Brussels, portableCAD was a brand-new market. While I urged developers to consider entering it, the market was so new that we didn't know the limitations developers would encounter.

A year later, CAD vendors had had about 6-18 months experience writing apps for portable devices, so that when I spoke at the conference in Amsterdam, I was able to describe in detail the drawbacks developers had experienced. In brief, the primary problem is that CAD is hardware intensive, but portable devices don't yet provide the hardware umph needed. It is difficult to cram the operating system, the CAD program, and all the drawing data into 0.5GB or even 2GB of RAM, because on Android and iOS devices there is no such thing as disk paging or the ability to add more working RAM. Similar, users can't just swap in a faster, CAD-friendly graphics board. Writing for iOS is difficult, because of Apple's secrecy (most hardware specs are unknown), while writing for Android is difficult because of device targeting.

The other problem, of course, is that apps sell for free, or nearly free, especially after Apple takes its 30% cut.

At this year's conference in Darmstadt, Germany, I reported that the portable CAD market matured to the point that vendors are now looking for solutions to these rather traditional problems:

A pricing model

A distribution model

Meanwhile, the hardware problem slowly resolves itself as the available RAM increases and the GPU attains better specs. Quad-core CPUs running at 1.5GHz or faster are now common, while units with 8 cores and/or speeds of over 2.5GHz are beginning to ship. Worldwide, 70% of phones and tablet are Androids, and Android tablets now have more than half the market. The primary exceptions are Japan and USA, where iOS still holds a lead.

State of CAD on Portable Devices

Autodesk by far offers the largest assortment of apps, with more on iPad/iPhone than on Android. Second largest is IMSI/Design.

There is little competition in the area DWG viewers, because Autodesk's products are free, are good enough, and are written by the originator of the DWG spec. The exception is IMSI/Design, who is determined to make a dent in the portable app world with its TurboViewer and TurboSite series.

In 3D, there is no file standard like DWG in 2D, and so far more viewers are available. Among CAD vendors with no interest in the cloud, several have released apps that link back to their PLM systems -- database viewers, in effect.

Let me summarize the types of apps being offered: most are drawing viewers; very few allow editing, outside of markups. Some are dedicated to proprietary formats; some let you view associated data, such as layers and attributes; some handle 3D models, and so allow view rotation and slicing; and most share drawings with services like email and Dropbox.

Actual Download Statistic and Prices

I mentioned that distribution is a problem. If we read publications like TechCrunch or press releases from Autodesk, then all we only ever hear are numbers that start in the millions. But the Long Tail problem dogs the app world, too. Let's take a look at actual download statistics. These numbers are from Google Store, because Apple store no longer has download stats. (Note that some free apps require an additional payment of some sort to be useful.)

Google Play Store, October 2013:

App Name (Vendor)

Downloads

Price

GStarCAD MC Pro (GStarsoft)

100+

$9.99

Map Viewer (Bentley)

100+

Free

TurboViewer X (IMSI/Design)

500+

$6.95

eDrawings (SolidWorks)

1000+

$1.99

Etoolbox Mobile/IntellICAD (CMS/ITC)

1000+

Free

Glovius (Geometric)

1000+

Free

HOOOPS Viewer (Tech Soft 3D)

1000+

Free

Nomad (Nemetschek Vectorworks)

1000+

Free

Revizto Viewer (Vizerra)

1000+

Free

Solid Edge Mobile Viewer (Siemens PLM)

1000+

Free

TurboViewer Pro (IMSI/Design)

1000+

$19.95

BIMx (Graphisoft)

10,000+

Free

FormIt (Autodesk)

10,000+

Free

Glovius Lite (Geometric)

10,000+

Free

GrabCAD (GrabCAD)

10,000+

Free

GStarCAD MC (Gstarsoft)

10,000+

Free

SubDivFormer (ASCON)

10,000+

Free

TFTpad (TFTlabs)

10,000+

Free

Buzzsaw (Autodesk)

50,000+

Free

ForceEffect Motion (Autodesk)

50,000+

Free

Autodesk 360 (Autodesk)

100,000+

Free

Homestyler Interior Design (Autodesk)

100,000+

Free

Inventor Publisher Viewer (Autodesk)

100,000+

Free

TurboViewer (IMSI/Design)

100,000+

Free

3D CAD Models Engineering (CADENAS)

100,000+

Free

AutoCAD 360 nee WS (Autdesk)

5,000,000+

Free

YouTube (Google)

500,000,000+

Free

Table 1: Download and pricing for CAD apps running on Android OS in October 2013

(Pricing and download stats may have since changed.)

What we see from Table 1 is that download numbers are tiny (with the exception of AutoCAD 360), and that the price is free, generally. For comparison purposes, I included the number for YouTube. Google reports numbers to the nearest 1xx or 5xx, so when you see 100 downloads, it could be between 100 and 500.

The troubling part is the following rule of thumb: download numbers are 6x larger than usage numbers, generally. Because apps are free to download and try out, it is normal for users to download a half-dozen similar apps, try them out, and pick only one to use. (Heck, I've paid for Android apps, and then abandoned them when a better one came along.) This means that 5 million downloads of AutoCAD 360 might translate into 1 million or fewer users.

I would suggest, however, that in the CAD world, the 6:1 ratio does not apply, because apps are not as interchangeable as in the social media world. There aren't, for instance, a half-dozen apps that view files from Graphisoft; there is just one.

Alternative Pricing Plans

The other thing Table 1 illustrates is the price of apps: free. And so CAD vendors now struggle to find how to pay for the cost of developing apps, a product development process that is not free. Figure 2 shows a sampling of some pricing plans introduced in the last year; it shows the variety of system some CAD vendors are attempting:

Pricing for iOS and/or Android apps, October, 2013:

Autodesk

Cost Per Month

Cost Per Year

AutoCAD 360

Free

...

AutoCAD 360 Pro

$4.99

$49.99

AutoCAD 360 Pro Plus

...

$99.99

IMSI/Design

List Price

Special Price

TurboViewer

Free

Free

TurboViewer X

$6.99

$6.99

TurboViewer Pro

$29.99

$19.99

TurboReview

$49.99

$29.99

TurboSite Reader

Free

Free

TurboSite Enterprise

Free

Requires credentials

TurboSite

$999.00

$499.00

Table 2: Two kinds of variable pricing plans developed by CAD vendors

(Pricing plans may have changed since October.)

Tied to Desktop Software

An alternative to charging for apps is to tie them to the desktop, so that the free program is useless without paying a few hundred or a few thousand dollars for the desktop version. Table 3 shows examples of such pricing.

[This paper was first presented at Bricsys International Conference 2013.]

To contact Ralph Grabowski for assistance in strategizing the development of your CAD app for portable devices, write to grabowski@telus.net

Paul F. Aubin has his new book out, Renaissance Revit: Creating Classical Architecture with Modern Software and it teaches complex parametric forms using Revit's Family Editor. He tells me, "This hands-on tutorial format book teaches many beginning through advanced family editor skills using the classical orders of architecture as subject matter. Whether you create traditional forms or not, if you want to learn the family editor, this is the book for you." For Revit versions 2012 through 2014: http://paulaubin.com/books/renaissance-revit

upFront.eZine (@upFronteZine): "Geeks for Monarchy:The Rise of the Neoreactionaries" It's remarkable the many directions human thought can wander -> http://tcrn.ch/1eod7ld

- - -

upFront.eZine (@upFronteZine): As soon as we take the vendor's side, we go against the reader. If we go against the reader, then we publications don't deserve to exist.

Letters to the Editor

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